Recently, the analysis of in-store customer behavior has been garnering increasing attention as a marketing strategy of retail stores. In this paper, we focus on the effects of customers’ migratory behavior in the inner areas on the resulting purchase amount. We examine the difference between the shopping path of high-volume customers and that of low-volume customers in the inner side of the sales floor to investigate how purchase amount differs when the shopping path contains a longer migration in the inner areas or a larger number of transitions from the outer areas to the inner areas.

This paper presents a real-time system of distributed video coding (DVC). DVC is a current video compression paradigm. The decoding process of DVC is normally complex, which causes difficulty in real-time implementation. To address this problem, we propose a new configuration of DVC with three methods: simple rate control without the feedback channel, simple transmitting of dynamic range and simple bidirectional motion estimation to reduce complexity. Then we implement the system with parallelization techniques. We also develop the encoder for a low power processor. Experimental results show that the encoder on i.MX31 400 MHz could operates at about CIF 13 fps, and the decoder on Core 2 Quad 2.83 GHz operates at more than CIF 30 fps.

Recently, Schwartz and Etzion proposed several efficient code construction methods of two-dimensional linear codes capable of correcting a single arbitrary cluster of errors of size . Some of their methods, however, impose the constraint that the degree of GF must be even. In this correspondence, we investigate whether such Schwartz-Etzion's methods are applicable to the case is odd. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the original Schwartz-Etzion's methods to be used for constructing two-dimensional cluster-error-correcting linear codes for odd , and show that the methods are available extensively.

First-principles simulations of large-scale semiconductor systems using the PHASE code on the Earth Simulator (ES) demonstrate high performance with respect to the theoretical peak performance. PHASE, designed for vector-parallel systems like the ES, demonstrates excellent parallel efficiency. We simulated an arsenic donor in silicon using up to 8,000 atom unit cell. A sustained peak performance of 14.6 TFlop/s was measured on 3,072 processing elements, which corresponds to 59% of the theoretical peak performance. Preliminary results using 10,648 atom unit cell are also presented.

Qualitative reasoning is one of the fault detection and diagnosis methods and is an effective way for complex systems. Especially, in the stochastic qualitative reasoning, the probabilistic process is used for state transition of the qualitative models with probabilities. In the paper, the stochastic qualitative reasoning is applied to a modelling method of the human qualitative thinking process based on the instrumentation diagram and the control information in building air conditioning systems. However, several subjects remain to be solved for practical uses. The paper proposes real-time simulation using stochastic qualitative reasoning as a way of practical uses for fault detection and diagnosis of a VAV (variable air volume) system of air conditioning systems.